Building Towards Scale: The Promise of Virtual Home Visiting

Hosted on November 5 and November 12, 2019, Building Towards Scale: The Promise of Virtual Home Visiting, was a 2-part series of GLR Learning Tuesdays Emerging Models sessions.

On November 5, Carly Roberts of the Overdeck Family Foundation explained why Overdeck chose to provide seed funding to support the development and early evaluation of virtual home visiting at Parents as Teachers @ University of Southern California (USC). Afterwards, Dorian Traube, Ph.D. and Amanda Taylor of the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work described how they prototyped a virtual home visiting approach in Los Angeles. They explained how the virtual approach compares to the on-ground model, including differences in recruitment and engagement strategies and the steps they took to ensure fidelity to the original model. They also shared the results of an evaluation of their prototype and explained some of the readiness components for organizations interested in adopting a virtual approach.

On November 12, CGLR continued the conversation with presentations by a team from Parents as Teachers National Center (PAT), including President and CEO Constance Gully, Vice President of Research and Quality Allison Kemner, Vice President of Professional and Program Development Donna Hunt O’Brien, and Virtual Parent Education Specialist and National Trainer Angela Rau.

Constance Gully introduced participants to the PAT model and the work it has done over the past 35 years to increase parent knowledge and engagement in schools and communities, enable early detection of developmental delays and health issues, prevent child abuse and neglect, and increase children’s school readiness. Since its launch in 1984, PAT has become the most widely replicated evidence-based home visiting model, offering services in all 50 states to nearly 190,000 families. Despite this scaling success and the expansion of other evidence-based home visiting programs, millions of pregnant women who could benefit from these programs are not being served. The PAT team described some of the barriers home visiting programs face in reaching these families and explained how, with a growing percentage of low-income families owning smartphones, virtual approaches can help overcome some of those barriers. They discussed a range of options, including integrating smartphone apps and text-messaging programs into on-ground models, hybrid approaches and fully virtual models. They also described cross-sector applications of this virtual approach and explained how they also are exploring the potential of utilizing technology to increase access to developmental screenings.